DAVID BROOKS'S SIMPERING, SELF-SATISFIED PSEUDO-CENTRISM TURNS INTO CLINICAL DELUSION

David Brooks made his weekly appearance on NPR's All Things Considered yesterday afternoon, along with E.J. Dionne. His response to one question from host Michele Norris about debt-ceiling negotiations showed that he's now made a psychic break with objective reality:

NORRIS: ... if they were to strike some sort of agreement, the President Obama could ostensibly strut on the other side of this and say, I took on the deficit; I took on the big entitlement programs like Medicare; I worked out some sort of concession on taxes.

Is there some sort of afterglow that could extend to members of either party?

Mr. BROOKS: Oh yeah, this is an incumbent protection plan, if they do it. President Obama would be in a great position to say I move to the center. Mitt Romney would be a giant loser. I think speaker Boehner and the House Republicans could go to independent voters and say we did this deal; we reduced the size of a government by $3 trillion. And then Nancy Pelosi would be the loser in that.

So if they cut a deal it's great for incumbents. I think it's great for the country. It's insane they haven't cut this deal.

What's wrong with this? Where to start?

With regard to the economic downturn, the American people are like a primitive tribe of people whose crops are being wiped out by a plague of locusts. The loudest voices in the communty have recommended a large sacrifice of virgins to appease the gods. Brooks actually believes that human nature is such that if a large virgin sacrifice is undertaken and the locusts wipe out the crops anyway, the public will be delighted at the glorious sacrifice of their virgin children even if nothing is accomplished.

The fact of the matter is, the American public doesn't give a damn about the debt in and of itself -- the public just thinks the economy is a shambles and wants something done about it. The public assumes that what needs to be done is somewhere between "the two extremes" being proposed (that's what the public is always told, so that's what the public believes). But what the public actually wants is results. The public wants the economy to get better.

David Brooks really does not understand that. Brooks ignores every poll showing that the public cares about unemployment a hell of a lot more than the debt, and assumes that the public just wants a compromise debt process as an end in itself -- just like Brooks's elite friends.

Or who knows? Maybe Brooks actually thinks Hooverism or Hooverism Lite will bring economic nirvana. And, heck, his wealthy insider friends wouldn't mind a little short-term belt-tightening for a path to "fiscal sanity," right? (Actually, the wealthiest would mind quite a bit, and have said so in no uncertain terms, and so they're never asked to sacrifice. But those who can't afford to sacrifice are assumed to have as much of a cushion as Brooks's posh friends, so Brooks figures a little short-term sacrifice in pursuit of a Big Deal will be shrugged off by them. And, of course, he rejects the notion that Hooverism won't even work in the long term, because only silly lefties like Paul Krugman believe that.)

This is how the world looks to David Brooks.

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And I don't know what Brooks's beef with Pelosi is -- I'm sure a great deal of it comes from something ugly in his psyche, some sense that she's a harpy or a harridan or some other toothed-yoni archetype in his little brain.

In the real world outside Brooks's brain, the flesh-and-blood Pelosi is reluctantly offering to do an all-cut, no-revenue deal as long as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are protected.

I'm sure that would offend Brooks as well -- one of his regular tropes is the need to stop spending so damn much on old people so we can spend it instead on things like vocational education. He's not completely off-base on this; I support single-payer as the cheapest way to cover everyone (which of course is politically impossible in America), and politically toxic ideas like comparative-effectiveness research and voluntary end-of-life counseling -- yeah, "death panels" -- so that people don't pay for expensive treatments that don't work better than cheaper ones, and so that they don't pay for futile life-extension efforts they don't really want but don't understand.

Brooks, I think, agrees on those last two points -- but I can't help suspecting that his sense that our budget battles are youth vs. age also derives from something in his own life and psyche, some sense of elderly people (his own parents?) as burdensome monsters. Even if that's not the case, he seems to be overlooking the fact that young people who need vocational education also have parents who get old and sick. For ordinary families, spending on the elderly helps the non-elderly.